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Italians Give Art, as Well as Take It Back

By Kate Taylor June 8, 2010 2:03 pmJune 8, 2010 2:03 pm

Is it a good cop-bad cop routine? Italian prosecutors are in offensive mode — investigating a curator at the Princeton University Museum of Art and a dealer in a case involving the possible illegal export of antiquities — but the Italian Ministry of Culture seems to want to play nice. It will loan several ancient sculptures, including three portrait busts from a tomb on the outskirts of Rome, to the Indianapolis Museum of Art for at least two years, beginning in January, the museum announced on Tuesday.

Italy has made major loans in recent years to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, both of which had agreed to return prized objects that Italy said had been looted. The Indianapolis Museum of Art has not tangled with Italy over artifacts. Asked how the loan came about, the museum’s director, Maxwell L. Anderson, a former curator of Roman art at the Met, said: “we asked.” The tomb from which the portrait busts were excavated, called the Vigna Codini Tomb, housed the ashes of freed slaves. The busts are believed to represent high-ranking servants of the Emperor Augustus’s family.